There are currently 99 US Senators. Norm Coleman is apparently determined to keep it this way as long as possible in order to deny the Democrats their 60 vote filibuster-proof majority.
The Senate rule for cloture is "The majority required to invoke cloture is three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn, or 60 votes if there are no vacancies in the Senate’s membership." source
Now, as I understand teh science of arithmetic, to find out the vote required for a 3/5 majority, you multiply N, the number of "Senators duly chosen and sworn" by 3/5, or 99*3/5, which yields 59.4 senators. Since senators cannot divide their vote, the fractional value has to dealt with in some way.
The standard way of dealing with fractional values is rounding to the nearest whole number, which in this case is 59. Therefore, the "majority required to invoke cloture" is 59 votes until the missing senator from Minnesota has been duly chosen (check) and sworn (not yet).
I know that this isn't much of a diary, but I was moved by the realization that all the drama about Al Franken, Norm Coleman, and the filibuster-proof Democratic majority might well be resolved by third grade arithmetic.
On the other hand, if there is some flaw in this approach, I'd like to hear about it. (There must be, or someone else would already have thought of it and the drama would go away.)
UPDATE: as was correctly pointed out in the very first comment, if 59.4 is viewed as a threshold that must be exceeded (which is in fact how it is undoubtedly viewed), then the smallest number of votes that would qualify would be 60 votes. But the rule doesn't talk about the number of votes, it talks about 3/5 of the senators duly chosen and sworn. And, in the real world, 3/5 of 99 is 59, not 60. So, even though the comment about 59.4 as a threshold instead of an exact quantity probably explains why the drama persists, I'm going to let the diary stay, because at least currently in the poll, the number of votes for 59 is pretty close to the number of votes for 60, and I'm curious to see how it will play out.
Greg Shenaut